Cremation was not a Mycenaean custom; Mycenaean shields are shaped like a figure eight; only few, late Mycenaean sites have safety pins. The corpses of Homer’s heroes, like Northern Germans, were burned; like them, their shields were round; and they fasten their clothes with safety pins.

July

D. M. Dunlop. The History of the Jewish Khazars. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954. 293 pp.

Spurious: When the Khazar king grew doubtful of his faith, he summoned a rabbi, a priest, and an imam before him. The rabbi asked the priest what his opinion of Moses was, to which the priest replied that Moses was a saint, and all he had written was true. The rabbi said to the king, look, you see, he holds all I say to be true, while I do not hold anything he says to be true that I do not also say. Then the rabbi had the imam poisoned on the road.

Hesiod’s cosmology, like the first cosmology in Genesis, is semi-rationalized: as cosmological elements became untenable, the myths were edited. Lucretian and Epicurean atmoism is in no sense scientific: no observation, experiment, or inference in it. Hippocratic medicine is closest to the modern scientific ideal. The prehistory of Greek philosophy, poetry, prophecy, and medicine would show the disintegration of the ancient Indo-European shaman.

At the wedding in Cana, the host comes to Jesus and tells him his wineskins are empty. Jesus instructs him to pour pure water into the skins, and takes a cup himself, saying that it is the purest, best wine of all, the wine that was drunk by Adam in Eden. The host imitates him, and passes the water around to his guests. Some of the more drunken guests actually believe the water is wine.

Judas is the disciple who understands Jesus best and tries most faithfully to do as he commands.

Mongol law was founded on the rulings of Chingis Khan, written in Uighur script, containing rules for the regulation of diplomacy, war, taxation, post, inheritance, and family.

Before the Mongol influence on Muslim lands, painting was restricted to abstract designs or miniatures; the thoughtfulness and artistry of Muslim illustrations after the Mongol conquest, illustrations of the Shahname, for example, show that there was already a tradition of illustration among the Mongols.

Paleo-Siberian (Koryak, Chukchi, Ainu) shamans are less often “gender-switched” than Neo-Siberian (Yakut, Buryat) shamans; but among the Paleo-Siberian, they are treated as disrespectfully as women, use the drainage entrances, live with a man and do the woman’s work and wear woman’s clothes; but among the Neo-Siberians, they keep it to wearing iron discs on their breasts, women’s hairstyles and clothing during their ceremonies. The word words for female shaman in Neo-Siberian langauges are all related but the words for male shaman are unrelated.

There is no pre-classical precedent for Socrates, unlike any other of the first men of Athens in his time, except the strange god Silenus. (Except he is more like a stone figurine of Silenus – Socrates will never get drunk no matter how much he drinks, and it is impossible to open up the god.)

John Ledyard. John Ledyard’s Journey Through Russia and Siberia, 1787-1788: The Journal and Selected Letters. Edited with an introduction by Stephen D. Watrous. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. 291 pp.

Walked around the Baltic from Stockholm to St. Petersburg in winter.

Had been with Cook in the North Pacific, had intended to cross to America and explore routes to the eastern states, had Jefferson’s backing, but was arrested in Irkutsk and deported to Poland.

In Cairo, he burst a blood vessel while vomiting after taking an emetic to calm his rage at having been delayed sailing down the Nile to begin his search for the source of the Niger, and died.

The ice at the mouth of the Lena is full of driftwood and trunks of trees for five versts out. He mistakes the Russian language for Yakut, after a year in Russia.

To read: Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great; Jeremiah Curtin, A Journey in Southern Siberia; G. Frederick, Asiatic Russia.

June

An economic explanation for the prevalence of alcoholism in communist countries: with no opportunity for individual investment and high inflation reducing savings, disposible income is mainly put in consumables.

Anaxagoras held that the sun was red-hot metal and larger than the Peloponnese. When he saw someone dying away from home, he said you can get to Hades from any starting point.

Aristippus, being shown a fine house, spat in the face of the man showing it to him. He could find nowhere else to spit, the house being so fine. At sea, he became afraid in a storm, and those with him asked why he, a philosopher, should be more afraid than them, plain men, and he replied that the lives in question were not of equal value. When he begged money from Dionysus the tyrant, Dionysus reminded him that he had said the wise will never be in want. Never mind, he said, just give me the money, then we will talk. When Dionysus had given, he said, see, I told you the wise will never be in want.

Some say that when Xenophon’s son died, he exclaimed that he knew his son was mortal.

As political allegory: the pirates have elected leaders, impeachment procedures, elected representatives to carry out impeachment, impeachment trial before the jury of all governed; whereas captain Smollet adheres to the rule of degree so far as to submit to leadership he does not believe in, his first major protest being the usurpation of degree, when his crew knows more of the voyage than its captain – that question settled, he agrees to serve under an inadequate leader, that he knows to be inadequate.

John Silver’s story stinks from the beginning: owner of an inn, yet poor enough to be forced to travel as cook in order to get a taste of the sea, while having a perpetually positive balance at his bank. He is terrifying because unprincipled; no other pirate would dare what he does.

Shakespearean construction: the situation from which the conflict arises, first act; the beginning, growth and vicissitudes of the conflict, first/second through fourth/fifth acts; the catastrophe, fifth act. The catastrophe, except in Othello (where Iago’s plot mves from success to success to final destruction), proceeds as a series of advances and retreats on the part of two opposed parties. For example Hamlet: pretends to be insane and convinces Polonius the cause is love (advantage); King is uneasy about Hamlet’s melancholy and doubts Polonius’s explanation (disadvantage); Hamlet combats and conquers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (advantage); but is tempted by suicide and is overheard berating Ophelia (disadvantage); the play is a success (advantage); but he spares the king in prayer and kills Polonius (disadvantage).

Iago, like Hamlet, is a mystery to himself, he has too many motives; unlike Hamlet, he follows his plan of action with too many too inadequate motives; instead of delaying a plan with a single superadequate one.

King Lear is not pessimistic, an attitude unworthy of tragedy; because the expulsion of evil from the society according to justice impoverishes it only insofar as it necessarily destroys goodness along with it; thus values are maintained, tragic values that necessitate the destruction of greatness along with evil.

Macbeth has the imagination of a poet, but its expression is confined to his ambition; and to his conscience. Lady Macbeth’s failure of imagination.

To read: Freytag; Simpson, Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare.

Symons’s biography of Rolfe reads like a plagiarism of his novels. Rolfe’s enemies are clearly visible underneath his scorn; his ability to portray them entirely from the point of view of his avatar and to retain the reality under the imagined injustices. Zildo’s Venetian Italian retained in the novel’s English.

The beautiful first few chapters, what his happiness would be. Minute accounting, the exact exchange rates of pounds and liri, the price of rolls, of rooms, all given exactly. Crimes marked and put in tables.

You could put your thumb in his pipe and neither burn it nor discolor it.

Old red wine, an egg, and sugar, heated.

James A. H. Murray. The Evolution of English Lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900. 51 pp.

The first English glossaries were compilations of difficult words in Latin manuscripts, rendered in the margins by easier Latin, and later by English, first in the order they were found, then arranged into groups all beginning with the same first letter. Now these works are the only evidence for some Old English words. Later word-bopks glossed difficult English words in easier English.

The scientific and scholarly vocabulary of English is Romance because learning in English was only in French following the Norman Conquest and the English learning was forgotten.

A dictionary as a collection of sayings on various topics.

The first universal dictionary of all words in English: “Cat, a creature well known.”

Richard Perceval Graves. Robert Graves, The Years with Laura: 1926-1940. New York, Viking: 1990. 380 pp.

To read: A Survey of Modernist Poetry, the 1929 edition of Goodbye to All That.

The philosopher is like the man who rebuilds his ship while already on the open ocean.

All logic can be based on the primitives abstraction and inclusion, but it is more satisfying to derive it from the three primitives membership, alternative denial, and universal quantification, because they correspond to three branches of logic: class theory, truth-function theory, and quantification theory.

Turkic heroic epics generally include a journey to the underworld, which is made through a tunnel in a mountain in a faraway kingdom. The shamanic journey is made outward through the heavens on the back of a goose or horse. The heroic journey is described, the shamanic one enacted.

Errors and inconsistencies come into trascribed texts, because the lack of audeince reaction and the artificially slowed pace to accomodate transcription fatigue the singer. Inconsistencies would not be tolerated by an attentive audience at an oral performance.

In a performance, certain lyrical sections of poems are improvised anew each time and vary extremely from performer to performer; the tags and lines introducing these sections are reproduced almost exactly between performances and performers, and there are again narrative passages, sometimes in prose, that vary slightly over performances and performers.

Racial hatred only a stimulus for existing economic problems: plenty of Hutu were massacred by the Hutu, plenty of Hutu in the invading Tutsi army; killing was mainly economic. Diamond refers to the Rodney King rioters as “poor people”.

The Easter Islander cutting down the last tree probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, since all the trees worth anything would have been cut down first anyway, and how was he to know it was the last? At any rate if he didn’t cut it down, someone else would have.

Salinization the result of irrigation for agriculture: surplus water soaks down through the topsoil, reaching the salt below, which percolates up into the soil; slow-moving underground rivers of salt flowing downhill ruin land between the stripped and over-irrigated land and the sea.
Recommended by Ling.

Althaea loves the things that are, Meleager the things that are not; she avenges her brothers, which were, who he had killed, because they denied that what was not yet would be (the domestication of Atalanta).

Paradoxical self-opposition of every one of the divine gifts. Oneness and twoness of twins, of brothers; wise meditation is impotent and old.

Atalanta, around whom the tragedy occurs, remains alien to it; her alienness was catalyst to it.

May

Test of a poem: write it out longhand, and where your hand sticks at a word, think what led the author to put it there.

The Aztec Eden: a fresco found in Tepantitla dated 300-600 AD: a river, jewelled trees, a spectacular serpent. The source of the river, which is shaped like a mushroom, is the mouth of the toad-god Tlalòc. A friend of Graves who ate mushrooms with a guilty conscience saw his hand rot away and then the bones disintegrated.

Too much to comment on. 100 books containing all knowledge eaten by rats, reconstructed, revised in the light of the advances made in the forty years since they were first begun, then rejected by a publisher – too long. (A previous work in infinitesimals by the same author got him thrown into prison – it was mistaken for political satire.) The horrible hanged twins. The honorable assassin having a commission from each of two rivals to assassinate the other, fulfills both, informing each victim of the other’s commission. The Wandering Jew’s only pleasure is to lure unsuspecting travelers to the dens of hungry lionesses.

The severed head of Orpheus causes a pile of a thousand guillotined heads in a cellar to sing, and Robespierre, who hears the song, loses his ability to speak and to lead.—Orpheus was condemned by the furies because, in presenting his petition to Hades and Persephone, he caused them to weep.

The guilty are under law, the just are in accord with it. The necessary is neither in accord with the law nor in subjection to it, since it can’t be othewise, but since the law is that from which it proceeds, it is not independent of the law.

Theft is not theft if God tells you to do it, since all property is his; likewise, adultery is not adultery if God tells you to do it, since any wife is properly his, and neither is fornication fornication, since any woman is properly his wife. Is sodomy, which is a crime against nature, properly sodomy if God commands it, since nature is his?

What relation between the self-perfective activities of the initiates of Aum and the interruption of the daily commute? The victims become burdens on their families and Aum renunciates cut all family ties; neither Aum nor the Japanese emergency response system was prepared for the aftermath; Aum members move stepwise upwards in a hierarchy simultaneously of command and worth, inefficiently regulated.

The sarin was cut – a pin-head’s amount is enough to kill. Causes blindness (contraction of the pupil) and inability to walk. The packets were wrapped in newspaper (one of the agents argued strenuously for using a mainstream daily with larger circulation over a tabloid) and everyone, including the police, hospitals, Aum renunciates and other associates, and the families of the victims, everyone learned almost everything they knew about the attack (where, when, how, what was used, who was responsible, who was affected, what hospitals could treat) from radio and television news; those who were the subjects of the news reports (prominent victims and their families, Aum members) spoke only of how their stories were garbled and deliberately distorted.

If a cow came into Mr Britling’s farmyard it would be shooed off again.

In the first months of the war, German soldiers were required to keep diaries, from which the French published extracts. British military personell, even recruiting agents, dealt with the public by being as slow and obstinate as possible; no black sandbags would be issued even though a sniper’s loophole shows clearly against a wall of ones.

Mr Britling consoles himself with an atlas and pencils, and thoughts of an international court at The Hague. Few remember that the Lusitania was not an American ship.

War sickens civilians, because outwardly, their life is essentially unchanged. Those they know who had fought have suffered an entire change.

Britling’s son’s letters must be taken from some contemporary diaries or letters.

Reversal is everywhere Nietzsche’s method, and is a useful tool so long as you keep an eye to what is uncovered in the reversal. In the reversal of Plato’s philosophy, the orderly relation of art to truth becomes disarranged and terrifying.

Will to power means all being is perspectival – like in Whitehead’s Minkowski universe?

The beautiful is letting-show – the grand style is the active will to Being, which takes Becoming into itself. What is classical style as differentiated from grand? Is Becoming the hule subjected to the morphe of Being?

Neil Gaiman. The Sandman: A Game of You. New York: DC Comics, 1993 (1992). 186 pp.

Importance of approaching Finnegans Wake without guidebooks (he would tie together all the chapters he hadn’t read with twine, and when he had finished a chapter, would unbind the next, and only the next – three years of reading), impossibility of doing without them. Objects to editing Finnegans Wake: possible elimination of multivocables. Studies fungi and grasshoppers when not writing on Joyce.

April

Unlike Villette as I could have expected. Some characters are the same, but the power of the narrative technique and its limitations are clear when you compare the two books. Syle of religion and style of government and conduct. No character wholly free from blame – Protestantism in storytelling, maybe.

Told from a self-righteous point of view, risks being smug, but family situation so well-organized and flexibly rednered it works. Big risk. Each character’s internal difficulties there in outline like underneath a sheet, easy to imagine what they are uncovered.

Rereading for a third time, I don’t find new delights. Old delights, in the same order, are as fresh as the first time. Some things change with experience: I don’t think it’s funny Hans is reading Ocean Steamships, it’s natural.

Castorp’s view of Settembrini and Naphta, same as mine: when he’s appalled and interested, so was I, I got tired of them just about the same time he did. Leitmotiv makes excellent comic mini-climaxes – bead four or five established ones, at modest distances, on a scene, and the humor happens by itself. Castorp’s accumulation of others’ conversational leitmotivs a conceptual letmotiv.

Unlike Ulysses in almost every way, but it’s the obvious comparison. Levin.

Graves’ pride in his regiment: history, behavior under fire, uniform, exceptionableness; but at the same time he makes farcical what that pride should be based in: hierarchy, justice of war, glory, death. The preface is cynical about the text, the text is sincere, sincerely angry. Seigfried’s bipolarism.

Passports were one of several temporary wartime measures during World War One that were never rescinded – before the war, only Russia and the Ottoman empire had border controls. Surrealism of modern tourism – from baggage claim checks that say they are not baggage claim checks to journeys to far-off places that are specially created to receive visitors from far off. Border/passport anxiety particularly modern (and easily dateable).

The Road to Oxania by Robert Byron the Ulysses or The Waste-Land of the travel book. Travel books unjustly excluded from consideration as literary works, and Burroughs and Wyndham Lewis much pored over while Byron is neglected.

Christopher I. Beckwith. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987. 269 pp.

Sino-Tibetan hardly a convergent family (like Altaic), no appearance of being a divergent group to someone acquainted w/ historicdal linguistics & Chinese & Tibetan. Early Tibetans acquired Buddhism through conquest and court marriages to Nepalese and Chinese. Bod first used to refer to conquered region – currently central Tibet – first kings of Tibet southerners.

Tibet one of the few nations whom Chinese diplomacy addressed as equals (not vassals or barbarians). Tibetan armor renowned, the Tibetan buckler a byword for quality among the Arabs. The Arab, Chinese, & Tibetan empires met in Ferghana in 717 at their furthest extent.

The Classical period in the east and the west roughly contemporaneous, but however, not succeeded by any dark age, rather expansion of literacy, trade, and improvements in technology. Prejudice inherited from Greek, Arab, and Chinese sources against “barbarians” – medieval Latin among the Franks not a corruption of classical Latin so much as the beginning of Old French. Likewise, Old Tibetan is not inferior to later, classical Tibetan. Both the Franks and the Tibetans spend much time translating and studying classical works and incorporating them.

Drawing-room comedy and Aeschylean tragedy have in common: articulate speech. wholly expressing the thought, little internal discourse or consideration of alternative courses of action (not on stage – George), the family setting, few concrete economic concerns or physical detail.

Disliked the happyish ending, unsure role Ms Buchanan’s illiteracy play, apart from showing Bullivant’s enjoyment of power – but that I knew from his treatment of George. Deathbed scene nicely horrifying, everyone in their turn told terrible lies. Mortimer, the cousin, and Gideon, the tutor, fill similar roles, so Gideon drops away after Mortimer returns, and is never given a love interest.

Anorexic, spoke about spiritual sustenance, continually starving herself in solidarity with this or that group, expresses religious feeling in terms of food. Disgust for human contact, hypersensitive to sex and terrified of rape, involved in the minutiae of her friends’ love affairs.

Unable to decide: to admire her for her truth to her beliefs, her willingness to suffer for them and her endurance, or to roll your eyes at her: she thought T. E. Lawrence wrote war as it really was, without posturing or attitudinizing.

Spoke ancient greek with her brother. Takes responsibility for all sins – admire, or laugh at – including her brother’s pacifism, which he arived at ten years before she did, and for which he was jailed under the Vichy regime.

Lectures originally broadcast by Canadian radio in English, shaped by questions.

Unhappy with the separation between science and mythical thought in the 17th century and the usual suspects: Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and “the others” (what about Kepler? or William of Ockham? – is science only a set of procedures of verification and myth stories without verification? – but Aristotle verified and observed, and Galileo’s experiments contradicted his theories); but the history of science is not his specialty.

Twins and harelips are connected in American Indian thought, because the splitting of the lip and nose is the beginning of the full split into two individuals. Those who are born feet first look up at their mother as they are born, and are threatening in the same way as twins and harelips.

Classical music, which must be listened to in depth (harmonically) as well as along its length (melodically) to be understood (and must be all born in mind at once, and non-contiguous parts brought ot bear on each other) is like myth, which cannot be understood as a story, but whose meaning must be understood in depth, and be compared with similar myths. Novels replaced myths as a literary genre at the same time as music became classical. As tone-row music replaces classical music, so the novel replaces the myth, bad analogy. Tempting to find a third term yourself, which shows something. probably.

Myths mean through us, ourselves unaware. A book writes itself, the writer is only the witness to the process. – It does write itself in one way, at least – the first thing you put down has its own necessities that are unforseeable until you try to work against them. Same with the second, and the third, and the effect is like pulling on the root of a tree, not knowing which way it will lead you next.

A Russian international criminal is obsessed with the jewels on a dagger housed in the Topkapi museum in Istanbul; with the help of a mastermind she plans to steal it. Suspected of planning terrorism, they are unable to use the weapons (smoke grenades and a rifle) they had smuggled into the country to assit them but outwit their surveillance, their true aim being discovered only when a bird accidentally let in through the window they open to gain entrance to the museum sets off the alarm.

Weaknesses: several minutes are spent explaining why only amateurs unknown to the police must be used; aside from requiring more explanation why the two principal criminals are not known to the police, it only serves to excuse their using a loafer picked up in a Greek port near the Turkish border, so he can expose them to the Turkish police through his bungling – the amateur status of the other members of the team is never touched on, or anything of their backstories. The entry of the bird is entirely fortuitous and adds nothing to the story; the mood of the ending is the same as if they had got away.

Tension of the breaking into the museum excellent – nearly silent, well-sustained, no music, timing of cuts from the empty, deaf, lonely roof to the crowded, roaring wrestling match. Characterization by face and posture brilliant – especially for the mute Turkish characters. Each partner in the crime gets a turn in the center of the story.

Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake. New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1992 (1943). Two blonde wives disappear on the same day, one corpse uncovered a month later at the bottom of a lake, is mistaken for the wife of the poor man, who has killed her to cover her own disappearance, and then she gets killed at the end. The policeman does it.

As you read, you see plenty of suspicious things, but nothing points you one way or another; and you come to understand things at the same pace Marlowe does, or only a little behind. Some mysteries, you know all the facts at the beginning, more or less, and you spend a hundred pages chasing the hares the author flushes, and then you get the two essential clues at the same time the audience in the book does – the portable audience misses the last two links and speculates fruitlessly, but is intelligent enough to grasp the whole solution when it is told at last – Marlowe doesn’t have a portable audience.

What is Marlowe like when he’s at home? What does he drink? Where does he live? What kind of cases does he get in between the novels? It’s not like Chinatown, not like The Thin Man, not like Christie or Doyle.

Violence, police brutality; also division within the police, gradations of responsibility.